K12

explain how interest in ancient texts led to demands for church reform.

The Protestant Reformation began as an attempt to reform the Roman Catholic Church, carried out by Western European Catholics who opposed what they perceived as false doctrines and ecclesiastic malpractice - especially the teaching and the sale of indulgences or the abuses thereof, and simony, the selling and buying of clerical offices - that the reformers saw as evidence of the systemic corruption of the Church's Roman hierarchy, which included the Pope. Both issues were dealt with in an altogether different manner by the Roman Catholic Church during the Counter-Reformation.